interest in facing this issue as shown by these hearings and we appreciate the opportunity to testify today. Amnesty International urges the United States Congress to join this effort and use its power and influence to end the practice of torture.

The United Nations defines torture as any severe physical or mental pain intentionally inflicted for punishment, intimidation, confessions, or information by or at the instigation of a public official. Concentrated in the torturer's electrode is the power and the responsibility of the, state.

With the government's support the torturer controls everything, even life itself. An Argentine woman, Graciela Guena remembers the guards telling her, "We are God in here," as they repeatedly applied electric shock to her body. "They called us 'the walking dead,'" she said, "reminding us constantly that the only thing to be decided was the time of death."

Degradation, humiliation, and unbearable pain are key in the torturer's efforts to break down all traces of human dignity. Prisoners are degraded with insults, sexual threats or assaults, the forcible eating of excrement, and the humiliation of their families. They suffer the pain of constant beating, electric shock, and having their flesh burned with cigarettes.

At times special apparatus are used. A Syrian tool is the "black slave," an electrical apparatus that forces a heated metal skewer into the bound victim's anus. Doctors in the Soviet Union administer pain-causing,

disorienting, and often permanently disabling drugs to prisoners of

conscience detained in psychiatric hospitals: In Chile doctors are present to insure that the victims survive for further torture and to prevent them from escaping through unconsciousness or death. If the doctors fail, they often certify cause of death as suicide or disease. Other techniques are devastatingly simple. In Rwanda prisoners have been held for more than a year in cells totally devoid of light. One Iranian prisoner was blindfolded for more than two years. A fellow prisoner, later released, noted, "After 27 months he sits, largely in total silence, nodding his head from one side to the other. he just sits knocking his head on the wall."

Sometimes

Torturer is no respecter of persons. Victims include people of

all social classes, age groups, trades, professions, and beliefs. They may be criminal suspects or political detainees. Children in El Salvador have been tortured and in Iran they've been forced to watch their mothers brutalized. Wives and husbands have endured the sights and sounds of their spouses being beaten, burned, or killed. One prisoner in Turkey witnessed the torture of a married couple in 1981. I will not repeat what he told us--it is unspeakable--but it is absolutely incumbunt on all people to understand that every act of inhumanity imaginable is realized in today's world.

Torturers are usually members of special military or police units or prison employees. How they become torturers varies, but insight into their training in at least one country emerged during the trials of accused torturers who worked under the military junta in Greece from 1967 to 1974. It is clear from this case that torture does not occur

simply because individual torturers are sadistic, even if testimonies verify that they often are or become so. Torture occurs because a government has chosen it as a part of the state-controlled machinery to suppress dissent. Its purpose is to intimidate victims and others from political activity and/or to obtain information or confessions with little regard for their veracity. In the Republic of Korea students detained for demonstrating and leafleting have been abused routinely at police stations and then released without charge. Some governments have tried to increase their control over whole population groups through torture and murder. This happened in Guatemala in the early 1980s, when the government terrorized rural peasants to discourage them from supporting guerillas. Tortured, dying villagers were displayed to relatives and neighbors. Newspapers published photographs of mutilated bodies, ostensibly to aid families seeking their missing relatives, but also to warn all Guatemalans.

There is no apology for torture, but apologists exist. They claim that the destruction of a few individuals can protect the lives of many. This argument is morally and historically bankrupt. When torture is allowed once, twice, half-a-dozen times, it almost inevitably will be used for broader purposes against a greater proportion of the population. The interrogator forces his prisoner to speak, to give information that may be false or confess to crimes he didn't commit--anything to stop the unbearable pain. Encouraged by the apparent success, the torturer goes on torturing. Other methods of interrogation begin to seem slow and inefficient and like a disease torture spreads. Elite corps of

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security personnel are created, trained in sophisticated methods of brutality and degradation. Laws that protect the populace are broken constantly by the very officials meant to enforce them.

Torture is fundamentally undemocratic and any government that tortures is not ruled by or for its people. If a government purports to uphold justice, torture must be banned, because it subverts a basic tenet of just punishment--a prescribed penalty for a proven offence. Since most national constitutions as well as international law explicitly prohibit torture, any government that subscribes to the rule of law will forbid it.

Following the tragic events of World War II it was universally recognized that a government that uses terror at home is also a threat to peace abroad. For this reason the United Nations established as one of its first acts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It stated, "No one shall be subject to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment." This right is absolute; no nation may derogate from it even in times of war. This principle was reaffirmed in the 1949 Geneva Convention and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In 1975 the United Nations unanimously adopted the Declaration against Torture. Now that organization has drafted two proposals that would strengthen previous declarations. The first would establish that a torturer could be brought to justice no matter where he is (the concept of universal jurisdiction) and would protect individuals from being forced to return to a country where they would be tortured (the concept of asylum). The second would outlaw specific conditions of secrecy that allow torture to occur and be hidden. We support both these initiatives.

International laws against torture are important because they set a legal standard torture victims and their families can appeal to for protection and redress against their own governments and organizations can use to hold offending governments accountable, but they are not enough. When the United Nations' delegates gather to decry torture, one third of them must wrestle with the knowledge that their own governments condone in practice what they condemn in public.

WORK AGAINST TORTURE

Amnesty International calls upon all governments to give meaning to their too often hypocritical declarations against torture by taking specific action towards its abolition. It's not enough to deny that torture exists. Torture does not occur in a vacuum. Certain conditions facilitate this most serious abuse of prisoners and allow its cover-up Amnesty International has worked against torture for more than 20 years. We have not worked alone. Lawyers groups, medical associations, church groups, and trade unions have worked to combat torture in their own countries. From and with them Amnesty International has identified conditions that have contributed to the practice of torture and its cover-up. With this knowledge Amnesty International has developed the following twelve-point program that must be implemented by any government serious

in its commitment to abolish torture 'and work for its end worldwide.